COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



government ever thought ; and it has generally 

 left it to the native village community to say 

 what share each man of the village should have 

 in the water ; and the village authorities have 

 accordingly laid down a series of most minute 

 rules about it. But the peculiarity is, that in no 

 case do these rules ' purport to emanate from 

 the personal authority of their author or authors, 

 which rests on grounds of reason, not on grounds 

 of innocence and sanctity ; nor do they assume 

 to be dictated by a sense of equity ; there is al- 

 ways, I am assured, a sort of fiction under which 

 some customs as to the distribution of water are 

 supposed to have emanated from a remote an- 

 tiquity, although, in fact, no such artificial sup- 

 ply had ever been so much as thought of/ So 

 difficult does this ancient race — like, probably, 

 in this respect so much of the ancient world — 

 find it to imagine a rule which is obligatory, but 

 not traditional." ^ 



Now among the European Aryans, within 

 historic times, this species of artifice assumed a 

 form which made it in a very high degree con- 

 ducive to the permanent progressiveness of the 

 race. If we look into the great writers who in 

 the seventeenth century illustrated with exqui- 

 site beauty and clearness the doctrines of Public 

 Law, we find their heads filled with the notion 

 of a primitive natural code, fit for regulating in- 

 * Bagehot, Physics and Politics , p. 142. 

 40 



